Technology Architecture View

This solution is based up on EMC and Brocade Hardware. EMC provides storage connected through Brocade Fabric. CESG security accreditation must be maintained at all times, this gives the cloud many restrictions on how the storage can be presented, utilised and managed. The illustration above shows how the infrastructure will appear from a storage perspective. The solution is described as:

A single Storage Array is housed within each access zone. All zones will have an independent dual Fabric SAN Switching infrastructure separate to the Fibre based LAN infrastructure. Each access zone has block level, fibre connected storage and an optional File level CIFs service over IP. The access zones are expected to differ regarding capacity. The CIFs services are for file shares and individual customer file share requirements, specifically for citrix workplace service.

The AZ storage array offerings is based on two models of EMC VNX midrange storage technologies: 5300 and 5500 models. Two Array types are offered to the access zone: Unified Storage Array (US) and Block Level Storage Array (BLS). These Arrays have pre-defined configuration with exception to capacity.

The following digram shows the building blocks of the two types of arrays.

DAE (Disk Array Enclosure) contains SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives

DPE (Disk Processor Enclosure) houses both storage proccessors and the first tray of disks in only 3U of the rack space using a single enclosure. This contributes to increased density of lower-end VNX arrays

DME (Dual Data Mover) is a component of the EMC VNX which is EMC’s unified storage platform. The data mover provides file-based protocol storage to hosts in the form of CIFS (SMB) and NFS to name the most common.

The VNX is a unified platform and by that I mean it can present both block-based and file-based protocol storage to an environment. The block-based component of the VNX is referred to as the storage processors. Think of the storage processors (SP) as the brains of the VNX. The most common protocols presented by the storage processors are fibre channel and iSCSI. The storage processors also play an important role in the file-based component of the VNX, but I won’t get into those details here. Above the storage processors is a 2U enclosure referred to as a data mover enclosure (DME). Within a single data mover enclosure is (2) data movers. Think of each data mover as a physical server with CPU, memory and ports for connectivity. In a typical setup, there is a single active data mover and a single standby data mover. The standby data mover takes over in the event the active data mover fails. In an environment where multiple data movers are required, you can have several active data movers (2, 3, 4) with a single standby data mover where that single standby data mover can take over for a failure of any of the active data movers.